UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor: Investigate the Possibility that Israel is Committing the Crime of Genocide Against the Palestinian People

Thousands of people marched through central London in a bid to end Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and the blockade on Gaza.

.. One of the protesters was Allison Pierce. Speaking to Anadolu Agency, Pierce said she was “appalled” by what’s happening to Palestinians.She said: “Do you want to know why I’m here today? I am absolutely appalled by what’s happening to the Palestinians. I think it’s genocide and I think it is murder.”

These are the limits to the apartheid analogy. Ultimately, the South African regime was overthrown by the black working class, who were empowered by the white minority’s dependence on their labour.

The Israeli state depends on massive foreign aid, not Palestinian labour. Consequently, huge numbers of Palestinians are unemployed and living in extreme poverty. Economic life in parts of Palestine, particularly the brutalised Gaza strip, has essentially broken down.

But the limits to the analogy are instructive to the violent dynamic of Israeli occupation. The Palestinians confront the Israeli state not as a dangerous necessity, but as an obstacle without value to the state.

That is why rather than exploit Palestinians, the Israeli state kills them, starves them, humiliates them, throws them off their land and forces them into exile.

In most of the textbooks given to Israeli children at state school, the occupied West Bank and Gaza do not exist. The Palestinian people are gone.

Shadow chancellor John McDonnell has been criticised over a speech in which he described Israeli attacks on Gaza as attempted genocide.

…Speaking to a Unite the Resistance event at a time of intensive Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza enclave, Mr McDonnell said: “It’s absolutely critical now that we use every platform we can to expose what’s going on, which is effectively an attempt at genocide against the Palestinians.”

Scratch under the surface, and the Conservative Party’s blanket refusal to acknowledge the genocide of Palestinians has a very clear motive: according to a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary 80% of its MPs are tied to the Likud-associated Conservative Friends of Israel; only last November was Priti Patel ousted from Theresa May’s cabinet for failing to declare meetings with Benjamin Netanyahu and lobbyists.

The tool used by the Israeli government and its allies is anti-Semitism and this allows them to continue their genocide of the Palestinians. But in Britain, real anti-Semitism still exists despite it being comparatively low compared to other countries. In September 2017, the Institute of Jewish Policy Research published a report entitled ‘Antisemitism in contemporary Great Britain’.

In September 2014, in the aftermath of the Israel/Gaza conflict, he was drawn into a row over who was to blame with another Twitter user. He wrote: ‘Sounds like an admission that Israel is committing genocide and that you’re excusing it because of the Holocaust.’ Four years earlier, Mr MacDonald wrote: ‘Apartheid Israel has killed the two-state solution: the only future is a bi-national democratic Palestine.’

The stalwarts of Labour’s left have refused to be cowed in the not-so-distant past. Before he became shadow chancellor, John McDonnell complained during a 2012 attack on Gaza that Israel was attempting genocide against the Palestinians. The complaint was accurate: genocide, as defined by the United Nations, involves inflicting physical or mental harm on a people.

… in 1937 at the Peel Commission, Churchill stated that the Balfour Declaration would make Palestine an overwhelmingly Jewish stated. Essentially advocating the genocide and forced migration of the Palestinian people… Since the declaration of independence, 70 years on the Israeli government continue their campaign of genocide against the Palestinian people and there are more than 5 million Palestinian refugees living in camps across Palestinian territories, Lebanon and Jordan, and in Syria.

Last Thursday, the UK Prime Minister Theresa May was doling out compliment after another to the Israeli delegation attending the event to mark the one hundredth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, a move that displaced Palestinians from their own lands and made way for European Jews to occupy Arab lands. Speaking at a dinner function, May said that Britain is ‘proud of our pioneering role in the creation of the state of Israel’ adding that she was proud ‘of the relationship we have built with Israel.’

… More than 3,500 civilians had lost their lives, a sizeable portion of whom were women and children. Some 17,000 Gazans were injured and more than 100,000 left homeless. Michael Ratner of the Centre for Constitutional Rights aptly termed Israel’s planned ethnic cleansing and massacres of Palestinians “incremental genocide.” And their retribution for the crime against them? The perpetrators of the genocide get felicitated at a dinner reception hosted by no less than the UK prime minister in recognition of their fine efforts, while their victims slide into anonymity.